This shoot was with the Time Out Paris correspondent for nightlife and the chosen venue was the live music/restaurant/bar/club hybrid by the name of the 'Alimentation Générale'. It's a well established place on the rue Jean Pierre Timbaud which runs parallel to the rue Oberkampf, an area which is always lively as I knew well having lived on this street in years gone by.
I wanted to shoot the venue when it was lively and arranged the shoot early in the three day shoot on the Sunday evening in order to be at the venue when there was a concert playing. A Brazilian band where scheduled to start at eight p.m and this is the time we arranged to meet
In the back of my mind I thought that arranging a shoot during a concert might be slightly problematic but having previously shot the venue I knew that the band would be onstage and I guessed it would be relatively simple to shoot Emmanuel standing in front of the stage. Wrong. When we arrived I noticed that the band were to be playing in a circle in the middle of the venue and I had the feeling it may be a bit trickier than first thought and this proved to be correct.
Once the band started playing everybody crowded round them and it proved to be almost impossible to find a way in to get the shot I wanted, this was compounded by the fact that I've got a light stand in tow which under the circumstances (packed bar/dark/alcohol) offered the perfect opportunity for someone to trip over the legs of the stand
In the end the stage came to the rescue as by standing up on it (wedged in amongst the other people sitting on it) I was able to get an elevated viewpoint to get the shot, I bounced the light off the ceiling as there was no space to set up the umbrella and the mixture of flash on the subject and ambient light on the background separated the two nicely.
Emmanuel handled the situation effortlessly and very graciously as I can't think of a situation to be photographed in to make someone feel any more self conscious. After this we tried a few exterior shots to add a bit of a mixture to the shots but there wasn't the same sense of activity as the others. It was a shot from the interior which was eventually used in the feature
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